From: Matt Pelletier <eastmedianyc@...>
Date: 2007-08-20T11:25:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on the iPhone

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Unfortunately it doesn't have most standard libraries or rubygems, which
make it somewhat limited (e.g. irb doesn't work). The iphone doesn't have a
compiler that runs ON the phone, so everything has to be cross-compiled on
your own computer. That means even once ruby is running on the phone, you
would have to pre-compile any gems with C before putting them on the phone.
For more complicated libraries such as ruby, compiling it required a lot of
hand-tweaking and static compiling. If anyone wants to lend a hand,
especially with just getting a solid ruby binary with stdlib and rubygems,
it would be greatly appreciated. There is a working toolchain that you can
install on your computer. We use this to compile anything (cocoa apps, or
just binaries we run from the shell). You can check out the following sites
for more detail:

http://iphone.natetrue.com
http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Check out the IRC channels from the 2nd link. Most of the active discussion,
especially for compiling, is in #iphone-dev and #iphone-uikit. The current
ruby binary was compiled by NerveGas.

If you have not been actively following the iphone hackery, there is a lot
of interesting and impressive work that's been done.

Matt

PS - Python is working pretty well, and includes a working module for
sqlite. There is a sqlite3 binary in the first link, if you want to run that
directly from the shell.

On 8/19/07, Evan Light <sleight42@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone else out there realized that Ruby has been compiled for and now
> runs on the iPhone?  If you have an iPhone, go visit this site:
> http://iphone.nullriver.com/beta/.  Installer.app will help you
> easilly install a terminal and Ruby (!!!).  Just go to /usr/local/bin
> and play.  I did a tiny bit of benchmarking myself just for giggles.
>
> http://evan.tiggerpalace.com/?p=30
>
> Granted that I haven't played with SWIG yet but I wonder how it would
> do for wrapping UIKit. I imagine that it's not nearly as simple as it
> sounds.
>
> Evan Light
>
>
>


-- 
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Matt Pelletier
http://www.eastmedia.com -- EastMedia
http://www.informit.com/title/0321483502 -- The Mongrel Book
http://identity.eastmedia.com -- OpenID, Identity 2.0

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